From: Glen Gray (glen at domain antefacto.com)
Date: Tue 14 Aug 2001 - 12:44:39 IST
On 14 Aug 2001 12:18:57 +0100, Caolan McNamara wrote:
> Its worth pointing out that {Star|Open}Office like MSOffice has a macro
> basic based scripting language and mailmerge stuff, pluggable databases
> etc. So you should be able to create a similiar system to your original
> word based one in writer. With the additional plus that, if needs be,
> you can write a seperate program in c++/java that controls a running
> copy of OOo to do your work.
>
No shameless plugs allowed Caolan. I did think of using Star Office (as
it was then). I kind of wanted to avoid using an OO controlled
application this time around and use the console based tools that come
with PSUtils etc. I did look at StarOffice many moons ago for this but
it's Macro language Star Basic or what ever seemed pretty limiting.
> So even if the scripting didn't work out you could go ahead with your
> preprocessing xml plan, except that you can use the OOo xml format and
> tell OOo to print it for you, that way you would have a far richer file
> format to use for layout issues, e.g. abiword doesn't do tables.
>
Very valid point. I'd forgotten that AbiWord didn't do tables, how are
they going to 1.0 release without them ???
If I was going the XML route would I be better off going completely for
the DocBook format for the templates. Surely DocBook has table support.
I've absolutley no idea though as I've not read much about it.
What kind of bloat would OOo add to such a process. It certainly would
give me a better layout engine, clients could write there templates in
OpenOffice and then the developers code use those as the basis for the
processing templates. The one complaint I've heard about OpenOffice is
that it's a major resource hog. It's getting better but has it gotten
better enough.
If I ever get the time to do this :-) I'll certainly look into using
OpenOffice and it's objects.
-- _______________________________________ Glen Gray Software Engineer a n t e f a c t o t: +353 1 8586006 www.antefacto.com f: +353 1 8586014 181 Parnell Street - Dublin 1 - Ireland
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